Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Naomi

The Rocinante burned, but not straight for the ring gate. That would have been too obvious. The intention was to rendezvous with the Giambattista in an ambiguous orbit, leaving it unclear to anyone watching whether they were looking to position themselves in a long burn spinward toward Saturn, turn out toward the science station on Neptune, or make for the gate. Let Marco wonder a little bit, and be in position when the distractions started pulling his attention away. Assuming he was even watching where the Roci went.

Naomi assumed Marco was watching where the Roci went. She assumed everyone was. She understood how much her old friends hated her now.

Even in this moment of relative calm, Jim was spending ten- and twelve-hour shifts on the comms. When he wasn’t sending out or receiving messages, he’d watch newsfeeds. The Free Navy presence was growing on Ganymede and Titan. The consolidated fleet splitting its forces in order to send guard ships to Tycho. Angry voices coming off Pallas to denounce the traitors who’d colluded with the inner planets; not just Michio Pa and her pirate fleet anymore but also the OPA factions that Fred Johnson had put together. It was how Jim tried to have control over something he couldn’t actually control. The messages he watched and sent out were a kind of prayer for him, though he wouldn’t have said it that way. Something that brought peace and the illusion that what they were caught up in wasn’t so massively bigger than their own individual wills and hopes and intentions.

So even though it set her teeth on edge, she let him go on with it. She got used to falling asleep to the musical voices of Earth newsfeeds, waking up to the hard cadences of Chrisjen Avasarala and Michio Pa in her cabin.

“We will burn after we see the consolidated fleet commit,” Pa said, her distant, muted voice sliding into Naomi’s half-dream. She sounded so weary, it made Naomi want to go back to sleep in sympathy. “I understand that’s not a popular decision, but I’m not interested in having my people be the worm on Earth’s hook.”

“I never understood that,” Naomi said. Jim closed his hand terminal display and settled the earphones down around his neck, his expression guilty. Naomi shifted, and the crash couch swung under them like one of the hammocks she’d grown up sleeping in. “How do hookworms figure into catching fish, anyway?”

“Not hookworms,” Jim said. “Worms, like earthworms. Or insects. Crickets. You’d put them on metal hooks with a barb on the end, tie a really thin line to the metal hook, and throw the whole thing out into a lake or a river. Hope that a fish would eat the worm, and then you could haul the fish out with the hook that was caught in its mouth.”

“Sounds inefficient and needlessly cruel.”

“It really sort of is.”

“Do you miss it?”

“The fishing part? No. The standing out on the edge of a lake or being in a boat while the sun’s just coming up? That a little bit.”

This was the other thing he did. Reminiscing about being a boy on Earth, talking about it as if she’d ever had experiences like his. As if just because she loved him, she’d understand. She pretended that she did, but she also changed the subject when she could.

“How long was I asleep?”

“It’s still six hours until we’re close enough to start docking,” Jim said, answering her real question without having to check. “Bobbie’s down in the machine shop with Clarissa and Amos doing some last-minute fixes to her combat armor. I get the feeling she’s looking to suit up and stay suited up until she’s on Medina.”

“It has to be strange for her to lead OPA fighters.”

Jim lowered himself to the gel of the crash couch, one arm bent behind his head. Naomi put her hand on his chest, just under his collarbone. His skin was warm. In the shadows, he looked vulnerable. Lost.

“Did she say something to you about it?” he asked.

“No. I was only thinking. She’s spent so much of her life with Belters as the enemy, and now she’s going to an OPA ship filled with OPA soldiers. We aren’t her people. Or we weren’t before now.”

Jim nodded, squeezed her hand, and then slid out from under it. She watched him dress in silence for almost a minute.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Jim,” she said. Then, gently, “What is it?”

When he did his little, percussive, surrendering sigh, she knew he’d given up trying to protect her from whatever it was. He pulled on his undershirt and leaned against the wall.

“There was something I meant to talk about with you. About the ambush where Fred died?”

“Go ahead.”

He did. Connecting to the Pella, trying to distract Marco, seeing Filip, disarming the torpedoes. He told it all with a sheepishness like a kid confessing that he ate the last bit of sweet. Even when she turned up the cabin lights and started pulling on her own clothes, he didn’t meet her eyes. Amos had called him on it, offered to lock him out of the torpedo controls. Jim had said no. His silence was the only sign that he was done.

Naomi stood for a moment, watching her emotions like they were objects scattered by an unexpected turn. Horror at the idea of Filip’s death. Rage at Marco for putting their child in harm’s way. Guilt, not only for Filip but for Jim too. For the position she’d put him in and the reflexive compromises he’d made on her behalf. All those she’d known to expect, but there was an impatience too. Not with Jim exactly, or herself, or Filip. With the need to mourn again what she’d mourned so many times before.

“Thank you,” she said, her heart thick and heavy. “For caring. For trying to watch out for me. But I lost Filip. I couldn’t save him when he was a baby. I couldn’t save him now that he’s essentially a man. That’s twice, and twice is always. I can’t stop hoping that he’ll be all right in all this. But if he’s going to get saved, he’s going to have to do it himself.”

She pushed away a betraying tear. Jim took a half step toward her.

“He’ll have to do it himself,” she said again, her voice a degree harder to keep him from touching her or saying something soft and consoling. “Same as everyone.”

When the Giambattista got into clear visual range, she wasn’t a pretty ship. Longer than the Canterbury had been back in the day, thicker through the middle, with a score of massive storage cells open to the vacuum where it had stored the ice harvested from Saturn’s rings or captured comets or any of the other sources around the system. Between the floodlit work shelves, the external mech storage sheds, attitude thrusters and sensor arrays and antennas, there were so many sources of drag that even the thinnest atmosphere would have ripped the ship to scrap. But no torpedo tubes. No PDCs. There were thousands of tiny boats tucked into the huge ship, and nothing more than a winsome smile and a handgun to protect them.

On the command deck, Bobbie put one hand on Naomi’s shoulder, another on Jim’s. “Freaking out yet?”

“I’m fine,” Naomi said in the same moment that Jim said, “Yes.”

Bobbie’s chuckle was warm. She was as happy as Naomi had seen her since she’d come back to the ship. She walked across the deck, mag boots clicking with each contact and release. It made Naomi nervous. If something happened to make the Roci move suddenly, either the boots would hold the deck and break her shinbones or they’d release and leave her bouncing against the walls of the ship. Not that the danger was real. It was only that, like Jim, she was probably freaking out. At least a little bit.

She watched the Giambattista’s braking pathway. The main engines turned off, the plume cooling and speeding away from the ship. It coasted toward them. Six thousand klicks. Five and three-quarters. Five and a half.

“All right,” Alex said across the ship’s comm. “Everyone hold on to your feathers. We’re maneuvering to dock.”

To Naomi’s relief, she heard Bobbie strapping into a couch behind her as Amos and Clarissa announced that they were secure.

“Can you knock?” Jim asked.

She opened a tightbeam connection. Waited a long moment, and found herself face-to-face with a man whose white beard and salt-and-pepper hair made him look like something out of a children’s story about wolves in human skin.

“Que sa, Giambattista,” she said. “Rocinante, wir. Go es gut alles la?”

The wolf grinned. “Bist bien, sera Nagata suer. Give us your warriors girl, and let us kick these cocks à l’envers a pukis.”

Naomi laughed, less at the vulgarity of the image than at the glee with which the old man said it. “Bien. Prepare for docking.” She cut the connection and called up to Alex. “We have permission to dock.”

Behind them, Bobbie was humming a melody Naomi didn’t recognize, but it was syncopated, upbeat, even playful. The Roci lurched, the couches all shifting a few degrees to compensate. They were almost in matching orbit. Only a few meters’ drift, and the thrusters under Alex’s care were drawing that down to nothing.

“He knew your name,” Jim said.

“You’re not the only one people recognize,” she said as the docking tube extended from the Roci and fixed itself to an outer airlock on the Giambattista. So close in, the hauler dwarfed the corvette. A horsefly and a horse. The scale of what they were about to try came home to her then and took her breath away. These two ships were the stealthy, small force. Easy to overlook in a system wracked with violence. Tiny to the point, they all hoped, of insignificance. And still huge.

“Are we going to be knocking around anymore?” Bobbie asked. “Because otherwise, I’m going to go get dressed and head over.”

“You wearing your power armor just walking across the tube?” Alex asked.

“You know how it is,” Bobbie said. “Never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

“Awesome,” Alex said.

“I’ll meet you in the lock,” Amos said.

Naomi looked over to Jim. He was frowning. “Say again, Amos?”

“Yeah,” Amos said. She could hear the smile in his voice. “I thought I’d head over with Bobbie. These OPA fuckers are our best buddies and all, but we’re still us and they’re still them. Someone oughta watch Bobbie’s six while she’s out among them English. Besides which, I’m going to be as good as any of them at breaking heads.”

“Might need you on the Roci, big guy,” Jim said, his voice light. “With the whole heading-into-battle thing, I’d kind of like to keep my mechanic close to hand.”

Bobbie retreated down the lift tube, pulling herself hand over hand, her floating feet disappearing last.

“That’s sweet, but you don’t need me, Cap,” Amos said. “Peaches here knows the ship as well as I do. Anything you need done, she can do it.”

Jim grunted, and she put her hand out, grabbing the edge of his couch and spinning it until they were facing. Jim saw the message in her expression. “Copy that, Amos,” he said. “Bobbie? Make sure you bring enough of him back we can regrow the missing bits.”

“Roger. Wilco,” Bobbie said. Her voice sounded close and echoing. She already had her helmet on. Naomi wanted to be reassured by the joy that Bobbie took in the anticipated violence, but she couldn’t quite manage. All she could do was hunker down and endure and see what happened next. At least she had practice with it.

Over the next hours, Bobbie and Amos inspected their new allies—the ship’s reports and logs, the ships in their berths, the OPA fighters they’d be leading on the attack—while Naomi, watching through Bobbie’s suit camera, cataloged it all. Racks of guns and boxes of ammunition. The motley assortment of boats and soldiers. Bobbie’s assessments were calm, rational, professional, and fueled the dread growing in Naomi’s gut.

Her mind wandered a little bit during the slow moments. Human violence as a kind of fractal—self-similar on all scales from bar fight to system-wide war. The buildup of insults and lost face that swelled over the course of an evening or a century. The shoving and shoving back, neither side sure they wanted to escalate and uncertain how to back down. All of that was the history of the inner planets and the Belt since the beginning. Then Marco had thrown his sucker punch and sent the system reeling back. Since then, feints and evaluations, flurries of violence that weren’t meant to end anything so much as find position, test the opponent.

Everything since the rocks fell on Earth had been preparation for this: a counterattack made in earnest and without reservation. Each side hoping to engineer a punch that the other didn’t see coming. Forgotten arm. Maybe it was in their blood, their bones. A shared human heritage. The pattern they were exporting to the stars now. It left her tired.

“Well, it’s not what I’d pick, but it’s better than I’d hoped,” Bobbie said from her new, cramped quarters on the Giambattista. In the background, Naomi could make out Amos’ voice, lifted and laughing among others. Fitting in with the new group. Or no, that wasn’t right. Letting the new group think he fit in. She had a terrible sense that he wouldn’t come back on the Rocinante; the empty premonitions of anxiety and impatience.

“Do you want to check the boats in more depth?” Naomi asked.

“No,” Bobbie said. “I can do that on the way. Pull the trigger. Let’s get this apocalypse on the road.”

“All right,” Naomi said. “Stay safe.”

“Good hunting. We say, ‘Good hunting.’”

“Good hunting, then.”

The words were powerfully inadequate. She dropped the connection, unstrapped, braced herself against the handholds on the wall, and stretched her arms, her legs, worked the kinks in her spine. When she was done, she realized it was the same routine she did before she worked out. Preparing for great effort.

She went down to the galley where Alex and Jim and Clarissa were eating together. They all looked over at her as she pulled herself into the room. “Bobbie says we’re good to go.”

“Well, shit and yahoo,” Alex said.

Jim pulled his hand terminal out of his pocket, tapped through a set of commands including one with a double password, then pressed a button.

“Okay,” he said. “Signal’s out. As soon as the attack’s under way, we’ll burn for the ring and hope no one notices us.”

They were all quiet for a moment. Naomi felt like there should have been some kind of fanfare. Gongs and trumpets to announce the coming death and destruction. Instead, it was just the galley, the four of them, the sound of the air recyclers, and the smell of chicken.

“Looks like a shit night for sleeping,” Naomi said. “I’m going to be up watching the newsfeeds.” Jim didn’t say anything. His eyes were sunken with exhaustion and something else. Not fear. Worse than fear. Resignation. Naomi pushed off, braced beside him, and put her hand on his. He managed a smile. “I’ll bring drinks and snacks. We can watch the fireworks start.”

“I don’t know,” Jim said.

“It ain’t sulking if we all do it together, Hoss,” Alex said. And then, to Naomi, “Count me in.”

“Me too,” Clarissa said, and then didn’t add if I’m invited. Against the backdrop of the war, it was such a small thing, and Naomi was still glad to see it.

“Yeah,” Jim said, “okay.”

It took hours. All across the system, drive plumes flared. Around Ceres and Mars and Tycho, the consolidated fleet leaped away from their defensive positions and into the Belt. The scattering of Michio Pa’s pirate fleet joined in, and the OPA. By the time the last of them reported that they were on the burn, the ships of the Free Navy were starting to react. The Rocinante traced vectors and travel groups, threads of light tangling the emptiness between stations and planets. Battle lines. The newsfeeds lit up—civilian, government, corporate, and union all becoming aware that something was happening and leaping to make sense of what it could be.

It was just after midnight, ship time, that the Roci raised the alarm.

“What do we have, Alex?” Jim asked.

“Bad news. I’m seeing a couple of fast-attack ships headed our way out from Ganymede.”

“Well, so much for not being noticed. How long before they reach us?” Jim asked, but Naomi had already queried the system.

“Five days if they’re just buzzing us and looping back,” she said. “Twelve if they try to match orbit while we’re on the burn.”

“Can we take them?” Clarissa said.

“If it was just us, might could,” Alex said. “Problem is we’re guarding this cow. But if we burn hard enough, we might make the ring before they get us.”

“Figure it out on the way,” Jim said. “Right now, we need to get the Giambattista up and burning as hard as it can and still let Bobbie do her inspections.”

“No plan survives contact with the enemy,” Alex said, unstrapping and pulling himself up toward the cockpit. “I’m warming her up.”

“I’ll tell our friends across the way to do the same,” Holden said, taking comm control.

On Naomi’s monitor, the thousands of hair-thin lines marked where the battles were, and where they were expected to be. On impulse, she took down the tactical display, leaving just the wide scatter of drive plumes all around the system, and then added in the star field.

It was the widest concerted attack ever. Hundreds of ships on at least four sides. Dozens of stations, millions of lives.

Among the stars, it didn’t stand out.